Elections and Fair Fights in America: An Institutional Account

Pointing at Trump’s hair,

“Look at our share,

That cannot be fair!”

Democrats despair.

Republicans declare,

“The Constitution’s there!”

Prologue

When Donald Trump swept across the American map to secure an Electoral College pickup of 306 against Hillary Clinton’s 232 and win his way into the Oval Office in 2016, his unexpected victory shocked the American political system to its core. What was equally shocking was the fact that Trump managed to win the Electoral College without a majority of the total votes cast. Naturally, this raised fervent controversy especially among Democrats, whose presidential candidate Clinton won the popular vote by 2.87 million votes. After all, how could the highest office of a nation that prided itself on the values of democracy be won in such undemocratic fashion? And more importantly, was such a win unconstitutional? Through a dissection of key elements of the Constitution and institutions such as political parties and electoral systems at State and Federal levels, this essay aims to explain how and why the Republican party of today needs less votes than Democrats to win federal elections while exploring the institutional tensions between federalism, republicanism, and democracy to understand the role of that very asymmetry in the American political system. 

America Is Not a Democracy

Had the Founding Fathers envisioned the United States of America to be fully democratic, they would have drafted the whole of the U.S. Constitution and its provisioned institutions in such fashion. But America is not a democracy–it is a federal republic with democratic features, and its political institutions reflect that distinction. In the Federalist No. 10, James Madison railed against democracy, calling it “incompatible with personal security and personal rights of property,” while John Quincy Adams wrote that democracy “wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.”  A republican (small r) Electoral College system of electing Presidents represents the manifestation of the institutionalisation of checks and balances against the very tyranny of the majority that the Founding Fathers feared; from the very first day of Independence, America’s constitutionally provisioned electoral system at the federal level was guided by principles designed to deter populism (May, 1957). And indeed, the mal-apportionment of Senator-linked electors to the Electoral College designed to level the playing field for small states in both Congress and the election of the President is a direct reflection of those principles.

And yet, in a Shakespearean stroke of irony, the very Electoral College designed by the America’s Founding Fathers to prevent a populist rise to Executive power was won by a populist. That Donald Trump won the presidency without the popular vote was not unprecedented (Geruso et al., 2019). After all, Bush triumphed Al Gore despite losing the popular vote. And before that, Harrison and Hayes. More importantly, the fact that the Republican party of today needs less votes to win a Senate majority and the Presidency is not because of the GOP possessing an innate advantage, but instead a result of the constitutionally-mandated equal Senate representation in Congress that naturally favors the party that commands the support of most smaller states. In fact, at the race level, Republicans do not need more votes than Democrats for Congressional seats or to delegate electors to the Electoral College; any Republican candidate that wishes to win a House seat, Senate office, or Electoral College electors tied to each state must still win more votes than the opposing Democrat–the popular vote is still very much relevant at the state level. It is only when it comes to winning Congressional majorities and the White House that the mal-apportion advantage emerges for the Republican party of today–this is by design.

It is also interesting to note, however, that the electoral system has advantaged different political parties in federal elections throughout various periods of American political history. In fact, it was the post-Reconstructionist (Jim Crow) era Democratic Party which commanded support from Southern states that held an electoral advantage over the Republicans in federal elections. It was not until the Southern Strategy spearheaded by Richard Nixon that captured the votes of conservative Southern Democratic voters disillusioned over the Democratic Party’s passage of the civil rights legislation in the 1960s that reversed this electoral advantage from Democrat to Republican (Aistrup, 2021). It was not too long ago when populous states like California were key conservative strongholds that reliably voted Republican until Clinton in 1992 flipped and dyed the Golden State into a reliable shade of blue that still persists on the electoral map today. The GOP’s loss of California, however, was accompanied by the shift of small states from blue to red that produced this partisan asymmetry charged by the mal-apportionment effect–it was this shift three decades ago that handed the GOP the small-state advantage that it still enjoys to this day.

Constituting a Constitution

To further understand this electoral asymmetry, it is important to acknowledge how the tensions between federalism and state power shaped the Framers’ decision to draft a constitution that rejected direct democracy in favour of the Electoral College in electing the President. These United States of America are a federation of states, and therefore the electoral process for the highest office of the land had to reflect the federal relationship between each of those states within the Union; the President of the United States would be elected to lead both the people and every state in the Union, and therefore could only be legitimately elected by the people and the states. Should a President be elected solely through a popular vote, he would surely command legitimacy solely among the people but not the States–the vice versa holds true–but alas it is not the United Peoples of America (Sances, 2023). The Founding Fathers understood no federated union could be effectively led by a federal government that failed to command legitimacy from the people and the states, and therefore the Federalists and Anti-Federalists reached a solution in the form of the Connecticut Compromise. It was through this compromise which mandated state representation in the Legislative branch that paved the way for the creation of institutions such as the Senate and House of Representatives to form a bicameral Congress while. This compromise came at the inevitable cost of mal-apportionment by giving small states greater power in the federal government, but the Framers understood this was well worth the price to pay (Dulio & Thurber, 2000).

This Great Compromise was also directly reflected in the emergence of the Electoral College from both a House of Representatives proportionally elected by the people and a Senate where each state congregated on equal footing. Ultimately, the Founding Fathers designed the Electoral College as an institution through which both the people and the states indirectly elected the leader of the free world (Estes, 2011). The Electoral College epitomized that very compromise and balance between the states and the people by institutionalizing cooperation and fairness in electing the leader of the free world–a delicate maneuver between Scylla and Charybdis. It was through this synergy that the Founding Fathers hoped to create the whole of a federal government that was greater than the sum of its parts by striking an elegant balance between the people and the states precisely so that it could command both the people and the states. The small-state advantage possessed by the Republican party today is not a mere ex-post byproduct of the Constitution’s provisions and institutions–it is an institution in itself strategically and manifestly embodying the core founding principles of the Union: the distrust of democracy and a fear of authoritarianism. 

Big Brother, Small Brother

Indeed, the mal-apportionment of Electoral College electors in favor of smaller states has been the subject of much derision and controversy among the American voting public (Shaw, 2022). Even in today’s America, this tension between federalism and states rights persists: Democrats have traditionally subscribed to the doctrine of “big government”–that the federal government should wield greater power at the expense of states–while Republicans have argued for the devolution to “small government” (Troy, 2009). It should then come as no surprise that the GOP commands much of its support from small states that would stand to be undercut and dictated upon by much more populous Democratic states through “forceful federalism,” as Desmond King (2017) puts it.

Perhaps the debate surrounding the Republican party’s electoral advantage today is a conflation of cause and effect: it is entirely plausible the GOP of today commands the small-state advantage precisely because small states have a vested interest in electing leaders dedicated to “small government”–or at the very least, maintaining a formidable counterbalance against the the Democratic party’s propensity towards “big government” (Plotica, 2017). The struggle between big and small government in America today is not a new phenomenon, it is the continuation and reiteration of the very same balance America’s Founding Fathers struggled with. America’s voyage through the waterways between Scylla and Charybdis did not safely conclude upon Independence, instead it is both blessed and cursed with perpetually navigating the balance between those waters guided by the Constitution.

Conclusion

To conclude, the controversy and contention surrounding the Electoral College and the Republican Party’s small state advantage is unmistakably marked by the perpetual tension between democracy and federalism. The Electoral College, crafted by the Founding Fathers as a compromise between state and popular sovereignty, continues to shape the outcome of presidential elections, giving rise to debates over its fairness and relevance in today's political climate. While the mal-apportionment effect may seem to favor Republicans, it reflects nuanced ideological tensions between the choices big and small government, echoing the enduring struggles faced by the nation's founders. To understand the Republican Party's electoral advantage in federal elections, particularly in the Senate and the presidency, it is crucial to look towards the history and intentions of the institutional designs of the U.S. Constitution, their tensions between principles of federalism and state representation. By that account, the small-state advantage is not much more than an institution in itself designed by the Framers of the Constitution as a compromise between those competing principles.

References

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Dulio, D. A., & Thurber, J. A. (2000). AMERICA’S TWO-PARTY SYSTEM: FRIEND OR FOE? Administrative Law Review, 52(2), 769–792. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40711882  

Estes, T. (2011). The Connecticut effect: The great compromise of 1787 and the history of small state impact on electoral college outcomes. The Historian, 73(2), 255–283. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6563.2011.00291.x

Geruso, M., Spears, D., & Talesara, I. (2019). Inversions in US presidential elections: 1836-2016. National Bureau of Economic Research. http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w26247

King, D. (2017). Forceful federalism against American racial inequality. Government and Opposition, 52(2), 356–382. https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2016.52

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Sances, M. W. (2023). Legitimate questions: Public perceptions of the legitimacy of US presidential election outcomes. Research & Politics, 10(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20531680231206987

Shaw, K. (2022). “A mystifying and distorting factor:” The electoral college and American democracy (reviewing Jesse Wegman, ‘Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College’). Michigan Law Review, 120. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4063125

Troy, G. (2009). Do Americans Like their Government Big—or Small? In The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.